1 research outputs found
Towards Predictable Real-Time Performance on Multi-Core Platforms
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) integrate sensing, computing, communication and
actuation capabilities to monitor and control operations in the physical
environment. A key requirement of such systems is the need to provide
predictable real-time performance: the timing correctness of the system should
be analyzable at design time with a quantitative metric and guaranteed at
runtime with high assurance. This requirement of predictability is particularly
important for safety-critical domains such as automobiles, aerospace, defense,
manufacturing and medical devices.
The work in this dissertation focuses on the challenges arising from the use
of modern multi-core platforms in CPS. Even as of today, multi-core platforms
are rarely used in safety-critical applications primarily due to the temporal
interference caused by contention on various resources shared among processor
cores, such as caches, memory buses, and I/O devices. Such interference is hard
to predict and can significantly increase task execution time, e.g., up to 12x
on commodity quad-core platforms. To address the problem of ensuring timing
predictability on multi-core platforms, we develop novel analytical and systems
techniques in this dissertation. Our proposed techniques theoretically bound
temporal interference that tasks may suffer from when accessing shared
resources. Our techniques also involve software primitives and algorithms for
real-time operating systems and hypervisors, which significantly reduce the
degree of the temporal interference. Specifically, we tackle the issues of
cache and memory contention, locking and synchronization, interrupt handling,
and access control for computational accelerators such as GPGPUs, all of which
are crucial to achieving predictable real-time performance on a modern
multi-core platform.Comment: This is the Ph.D. dissertation of the autho